interesting fact

clockwise is only clockwise because that is the direction of time, of a shadow, on a sundial in the northern hemisphere.

In the San Francisco office of Cloudflare, lava lamps are used as a physical randomness generator. This is back to internet security and SSL, but on a much bigger scale than Netscape: Cloudflare handles over a quarter of a quadrillion encryption requests per day. About 10 per cent of all web traffic relies on Cloudflare. This means they need a lot

‘Apple’ was a generic word for fruit in ancient Greece and Rome, and the golden apples were originally depicted as quinces, as they were in the frieze in the Temple of Zeus,

Giovanni Battista Ferrari in Hesperides (1646). He believed that a Genoese missionary had brought an orange to Sicily from China that tasted strangely like a grape and he remarked on its ‘purple’ flesh. This distinctive colouring is due to the blood-coloured pigments called anthocyanins that are also found in red, purple and blue ‘super fruits’ suc

marmalade was not made on a commercial scale until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when stormy weather forced a Spanish ship laden with Sevilles to take shelter in the harbour at Dundee. James Keiller, a local grocer, bought the cargo at a very low price, only to discover that the oranges were sour, not sweet, and he was unable to sell the

That same music would turn into sonic mush in a cathedral.F Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters. The reverberation time in those spaces is very long—more than four seconds in most cases—so a note sung a few seconds ago hangs in the air and b

Professor Naomichi Ishige is an anthropologist of Japanese food who has published over eighty books. He once conducted an experiment on some of his Japanese seminar students, asking them: ‘Suppose you lend an article that you use to someone else, who uses it, and then thoroughly cleans it before returning it to you. Which article would you have the

Many people think that spit-roasting meant roasting over the fire, but in fact the cooking took place a good distance to the side of the fire, the meat only getting moved close up right at the end to brown it. This is a similar technique to a modern Argentine asado, where a whole animal is slow-roasted at an angle several feet from an outdoor charc

On paper, therefore, the Victorian logic looks sound: once you have got cooking water at or near 212 °F/100 °C, it shouldn’t really make much of a difference whether the water is vigorously bubbling or only simmering. Yet our eyes and tastebuds tell us that it does. The reason is that properly boiling water moves chaotically and transfers heat to t